I would like to tell you a story. It is the story of your life, the story of everyone’s life.

After you were conceived, you lived for nine months in the womb, though you weren’t aware that nine months were passing. As far as you were concerned, you had always been there. Always, since your very beginning, forever and ever, you had been there. It was eternity for you. It was paradise. If in natural circumstances everything you could possibly want or need was provided before you actually needed it, you never had to feel that something was missing. Everything was exactly as it should have been.

And then one day, it was time for you to be born. Within a matter of minutes, everything changed for you. You were thrown out of paradise into what we call life. There was no warning; no one prepared you for this major change. It was a huge shock.

After spending an eternity in darkness, suddenly bright light was everywhere.

After spending an eternity where the temperature was always exactly right, suddenly it was extremely cold. After spending an eternity where all sounds were soft, muffled, and familiar, suddenly every sound seemed unnaturally loud and harsh, unpleasant and threatening. After spending an eternity surrounded and supported on all sides by something soft and warm, suddenly nothing was there, you were free-floating in wide-open space. You were being wrapped in a sheet or cloth, which the adults around you thought was very soft, but it felt like sandpaper to you.

As if all this shock were not enough, if your umbilical cord was cut too soon, you began to suffocate. You felt as if you were going to die. To save your own life you had to start breathing on your own. But this first breath was not a pleasant breath; the air felt harsh and hot.

You went from paradise to shock in just a few minutes. You moved from comfort, security, safety, and perfection—from the paradise of the womb to the experience of almost dying. The first thing you consciously did was to try to save your life. You were in a state of pure panic.

When you’re in danger, you have a natural tendency to pull your energy in. Look at most babies who have just been born. They are still clenching their hands; their eyes are tightly shut. We think it’s natural, but the baby is saying, “I have to defend myself in order to save my life. I’m afraid to let go.” When you were born, in a state of panic, the only thing you could do to protect yourself was to contract. Not only your physical body contracted, but something at a very deep level contracted as well. And it hasn’t relaxed since.

All babies—even those born in more natural ways—realize something very quickly: “I can’t do anything for myself. I depend on others. I’m in trouble now.”

But you had the instinct to survive. You also had the intelligence to know that you were helpless. When you were in the womb, your mother took care of you, but after you were born, you felt that you were in danger, and your own defense mechanisms began to function. Your first thoughts were based on fear:

“I’m weak. I’m helpless. I’m in danger.”

“I’m defenseless. I’m vulnerable. I’m inadequate.”

“I can’t take care of myself.”

“I’m somehow separate from everything else.”

“I won’t survive unless someone or something takes care of me.”

Although you aren’t thinking these exact words, nevertheless, the feeling was there.

The Original Programming

It is extremely important for you to grasp that your first self-image, your first ideas about yourself, came at these early moments in life. And these ideas were: “I’m weak. I’m helpless. I won’t survive unless someone takes care of me.”

This is the first programming that went into your mental computer, and after all this time it’s still there. None of the programming that came after this is new; it’s an extension, another layer, of the original program. At your core, you still feel about yourself the way you felt then: “I’m weak, helpless, defenseless, vulnerable, inadequate, and I can’t take care of myself. I need someone else to guarantee my survival.”

Although it may be difficult to accept this, nevertheless it’s important to see that it formed the beginning of your ego. It was the beginning of your defense system. It was the beginning of your mind. It’s just as fresh now as it was the day you were born, though it’s been covered up and disguised.

Following this idea for a bit, let’s see how this original program led to the creation of other programs. Picture yourself as a baby. You’re totally helpless. You’re also extremely intelligent and vulnerable, and you know you can’t do anything for yourself. After a few days, you notice that someone is there for you regularly. You don’t yet know that this person is your mother, or perhaps a grandmother, or sister, but this nice lady comes in, picks you up, feeds you, changes your diapers, and makes you feel safe and content. Very soon you realize that your survival depends on this nice lady.

The nice lady is survival itself. The nice lady is Mrs. God. And because you have tremendous intelligence you’re very sensitive to her moods, her attitudes, her tension. You feel her fear. This makes you tense. Because if Mrs. God is tense, what is the state of the world?

Sooner or later, this nice lady begins letting you know that some things you do please her, while some other things displease her. Soon she starts expecting things from you, and you begin to do these things very naturally. As you learn to do more and more things, you use your new abilities to please her, to keep her happy and, yes, to manipulate her.

Perhaps one of the first things a baby learns is to use crying as a tool. If it works—if mother comes when baby cries—then baby cries more and more to get mother to come. If mother doesn’t come, then baby drops that tool and is silent. If a big fuss is made about your learning to walk, you try to walk sooner. You use all your intelligence and all your abilities to guarantee your survival. You learn at a very early age to manipulate others and yourself for one reason only—to assure your survival. To do this, you create survival strategies—behavior patterns to help you get your needs met and to feel better.

But even when you can walk and talk and do many other things, down deep this same program continues to run, which says: “I’m weak, I’m helpless, I’m defenseless, vulnerable, inadequate, and I won’t survive unless someone takes care of me.” The strategies you work out are based on your original feelings of helplessness. They are not arising moment to moment in your present life. The strategies are formed because of this first feeling you had: “I can’t take care of myself. Therefore, I have to impress other people. It’s important what other people think of me. If they don’t like me, they’re probably not going to take care of me.” The original fear remains, along with the original tension.

You began manipulating your life to make it secure and to guarantee your safety. You began to realize that some things worked better than others. Some things got you the kind of attention you wanted, and others got you the safety and security you wanted. Other things had the opposite effect. They made your mother or parents angry and therefore created uncertainty in your life. So you learned at a very early age to begin choosing the strategies that worked for you and to disregard those that didn’t.

Your Development by Age Four

This process went on until you were about four years old, when you had already been through every major experience for the first time: what it’s like to be loved, what it’s like to be rejected, what it’s like to be hungry, what it’s like to be lost, what it’s like to be alone. You had already learned how to react to strangers and how to react when someone gave you something or took something away. You had already learned to be an introvert or an extrovert. You had already learned to be aggressive or to be passive.

You had already learned these things by the time you were four. All the strategies you had learned by this age became constellated as part of your defense system, your way of keeping yourself alive. And, of course, you felt that everything depended on other people taking care of you. Later this became very important for you in your relationships with other people, because you thought that if you did the right thing, they would continue to take care of you. At the base of all our strategies is the child’s worry and anxiety that it can’t take care of itself. All its manipulations, all its attitudes, all its strategies are based on overcoming this primary fear.

Picture yourself as a four-year-old. You have attitudes, impressions, and programs running that you have had since birth. Other programs have been there since you were two months old, six months old, a year old, two years old, three years old, and so forth. However, the longer the programs have existed, the more fixed they have become. The oldest and most fixed program is still the one that says: “I’m weak and helpless, I’m defenseless, I’m vulnerable, I’m cut off from existence, and I can’t survive unless someone takes care of me.”

By the time you were four, your basic personality structure, your basic attitude toward yourself, toward other people, and toward the world had already been formed. Since then, basically nothing has changed—except that you have perfected your strategies. You have learned to cover up certain attitudes, which you know others don’t like, and you have learned to use certain attitudes and strategies to your advantage. All your programs were running then, but in a cleaner, purer, and more open form. If you really want to understand yourself today, go back to that four-year-old you used to be.

From now on, when we speak of the four-year-old, we’re speaking of the sum total of all your strategies, attitudes, programs, and conditioning—all that you had acquired by the time you were four.

That four-year-old is stored in the part of your mind that is not conscious: it is stored in the subconscious, which amazingly is about 99 percent of the mind! Considering its size, it is therefore much stronger then the conscious part of your mind. That means that the four-year-old is much bigger and stronger than you, the conscious adult self. It also means that your childish attitudes are by far more powerful than your adult attitudes. This is very important, because the subconscious cannot tell the difference between the past and the here and now, between what is memory and what is reality.

The Difference between Memory and Reality

Memory is not reality, though it seems real enough to the subconscious, to the four-year-old. Rather, it is an artificial reality, in the same way that a movie is. You know that if you go to a movie theater and look at the screen closely, it’s simply a flat surface with light flickering on it. There are no people on the screen, and what you see is not real. You may sit in the audience and cry genuine tears, but it doesn’t mean that something real is happening on the screen. You are actually watching, and then reacting to, an illusion.

I don’t mean to imply that memory is useless. As a matter of fact, we would be lost without memory, which we use in practical ways that serve us. We speak English through the process of memory; we drive a car through the process of memory. But memory needs to be put in context.

From very early on, if you have an experience, you internally and unconsciously record it. It’s like taking a picture. Some pictures are traumatic or fearful, others are happy, and still others are bland and less interesting. But everything gets duly recorded. As you go through life, recording everything that happens to you, you create quite a collection of impressions—almost like your own museum with thousands, maybe millions, of photographs. These photographs are put together like home videos in your mind, with different scenes running all the time. It’s like a cinema complex that has ten different films playing with a simultaneous selection of tragedies, comedies, and love stories.

The same thing goes on in your head, only with a lot more screens. If someone says, “I don’t like the way you did that,” then movie number twenty-eight comes up. If someone says, “Your hair looks nice,” then movie number forty-five comes up. These movies are running constantly, and your subconscious believes in them. It is familiar with these movies, because it has been watching them for as long as they have been there. They actually feel more real than life does. The subconscious is experiencing and reexperiencing these old movies all the time.

We all project these old movies onto our present life and think we are experiencing reality. But in fact we are mostly experiencing the old movies again and again. Your subconscious, your four-year-old self, can’t tell the difference between these old inner movies and your real life in the present moment.

When something happens to you in the present, immediately an old movie starts playing in your head, one that resembles something occurring in your life today. If it happens to be a movie about something unpleasant, your four-year-old thinks that the old unpleasant thing is happening again today and fears that he won’t survive. He reacts with panic, so you, the adult, also react with panic. But you don’t know why.

I once did some regression work with a man I’ll call John. As referred to by Jeru, regression is a state of consciousness in which the person has slipped into a younger age than their real-life age and is responding to something that happened at that younger age. If I feel afraid and my survival is not in danger, the fear is coming from the regressed state, from a younger age when my survival could have bee in danger. John had terrible relationships with women. When he was about four, he was playing in the backyard, while his mother leaned over the fence talking to the neighbor. He heard her say: “Well, we didn’t really want little Johnny.” That’s all it took. Little Johnny heard that and ran off, overwhelmed with pain. Of course his mother undoubtedly went on to say, “But you know, when he came along we were very happy about it.”

But Little Johnny only heard, “I’m not wanted.” And because the event was so painful, he stored the memory deep in his subconscious, though he repressed the memory and “forgot” all about it. But from that moment on, deep down, he felt totally lost and alone in the world, unloved, and not at home. Of course his mother told him that she loved him many times, but he felt that he couldn’t trust her and that she never really wanted him.

When John became an adult, this feeling of being abandoned and alone was harming his relationships with women. It was only a memory, and probably a flawed one, yet his four-year-old self would relive the terrible feelings every time it saw that “movie.” For this man, it remained his reality, and the past was thus always alive in the here and now. Actually, the past is still alive for most of us.

The Illusion of the Past

There is no such thing as the past. Your four-year-old is afraid of something that doesn’t actually exist anymore. She’s afraid of those memories, believing that the memories are reality. She thinks that the movie is real. If a dragon appears on the movie screen, she thinks it’s a real dragon. You have to point out to her that it’s not a real dragon. It’s just light shining on a screen. It’s just an illusion.

When you were a child you repressed certain painful memories because you didn’t want to feel them again, but now you can see that those memories are part of the past and hence no longer relevant. Your past is now as irrelevant to you as my past is irrelevant to you. Neither my past nor your past can affect you, not unless you erroneously believe that it can, not unless you allow it to.

It is very important for you to understand that there’s no such thing as the past. There’s only now, along with a collection of memories, which are like old photographs in an album. Although you can view them in the here and now, you can see that they’re only faded photographs, old images from the past. The more distance you can get from these photographs, the more you can see that they’re not real life in the now.

In the same way, you don’t have to be afraid of your memories. Your four-year-old is afraid of some of them, because she does not want to once again feel the fear attached to them. But don’t think you can just humor your four-year old, who thinks there actually is a dragon, because then she will be panic-stricken and take over. Rather, you must convince your four-year-old that it’s safe to look at these old photographs, telling her that the dragons of memory are simply harmless illusions that cannot hurt her anymore.

We cannot change as long as we believe our old movies are real. We need to liberate ourselves from them. To begin with, we have to recognize that they are simply movies, not real life. And then we have to exit the movie and convince the subconscious, the four-year-old, that the movie is no longer relevant.

Though this process sounds easy, it can be very difficult. It requires constant attention and practice. Learning how to be present enough to see that the movie is just an illusion can be a major challenge. However, once you are able to free yourself from stagnant memories, you become liberated. That is the secret. But as long as you believe, subconsciously, that your memories are real, they can make your present life miserable.

There’s No Such Thing as a New Desire

You can also make your life miserable with long-cherished wishes or desires that never seem to come true for you. Every desire that you have today is the outgrowth of a previous, unfulfilled desire from the past. If you traced it back far enough, you’d trace it back to birth.

As an example, let’s assume that you said, “I want to go to downtown tonight.” That’s a desire. But we could ask, “Why do you want to go downtown tonight?” and you would say, “I want to go to the opening of the new nightclub.” So you really didn’t want to go downtown; you want to go to the opening of the new nightclub. If the club had been at the beach, you would have wanted to go to the beach.

Wanting to go to the opening of the new club is a desire, behind which must lie another desire. So we could ask why you want to go to the opening. You say, “Because I want to meet my friends there.” That’s another desire, isn’t it? So we could ask what desire is behind this one: “Why do you want to meet your friends there?” You say, “Because I want to be part of the ‘in’ crowd.” Wanting to be part of the “in” crowd is another desire. So we ask why you want to be part of the “in” crowd. You reply is, “I want to be popular.” “Why do you want to be popular?” “So I’ll have lots of friends.” Why do you want to have lots of friends?” “So I’ll never be alone.” “Why don’t you want ever to be alone?” “So there will always be someone to take care of me.” “Any why do you want someone to take care of you?” “Because I feel I can’t take care of myself and that all by myself I cannot survive.”

This is not oversimplified; it is the truth. The reason that you wanted to go downtown tonight has its source in early childhood. What you truly wanted was to be around lots of friends so that there would always be someone to take care of you, because deep down you are still feeling weak and helpless.

You can go through this process with every desire and discover its beginning in infancy. There’s no such thing as a new desire. It’s simply a new expression of an old one. You’re still trying to get something that you didn’t manage to get when you were an infant. For example, if you have a desire to be popular, you also have the desire to dress stylishly, and you want your hair to look nice, and so on. You have other desires that branch out of this one desire to be popular.

Each of these desires branches out and proliferates, leading to several other desires, so it gets to be like a tree. You start with one desire, which branches out into two and then four and then eight desires, and they in turn branch out into many more desires. But they can all be traced back to one source, one trunk. Desires are also like fruit on a tree. The fruit doesn’t just appear from nowhere. It’s connected to a small twig, to a small branch, to a bigger branch, and then to the trunk. All your desires come from the original desire, which was to have someone take care of you so that you would survive. That is all your subconscious has ever really worried about, but now that you are an adult it has taken on many forms and has many expressions.

The Fear of Not Surviving

Let’s leave desire for a moment and consider fear. It’s easy to see how every fear is basically a fear of not surviving. Are you afraid of suffocating? Are you afraid of drowning? These are just different ways of expressing the fear of not surviving. You may think you have fears that aren’t related to surviving, but if you examine them closely, you’ll find, in fact, that all of them are.

One of the most common fears is being afraid of what other people think about you. That fear began in childhood when you were worried about what your mother thought about you. If she didn’t like you or was somehow not at ease with you, she might leave you, and your survival would be in danger. So in that old context, you’re still worried about what other people think of you.

To put it plainly, all fears can be traced back to the fear of not surviving. And all desires can be traced back to the desire to survive.

Let’s consider fears and desires in a different way. A desire is just a fear expressed in a positive way, and a fear is just a desire expressed in a negative way. The desire “I want to be rich” is just a different way of saying “I’m afraid of being poor.” “I want to be well-informed” is exactly the same as “I’m afraid of not knowing what’s going on.” “I want to control my environment” is the same as “I’m afraid that my environment is going to control me.”

Any fear you have can be expressed as a desire, and any desire that you have can be expressed as a fear. They aren’t even two sides of the same coin; rather, they’re exactly the same thing, expressed in two different ways.

Several practices help you to become more aware of your desires. One of these, the Trapdoor Game, which we will explore in chapter 5, allows you to see that all your present desires have their source in the past, and that this past is just a bundle of memories. It’s no longer actually happening now, and you see that you longer need to be influenced by it.

I have much more to say, but this is the essence of the story I wanted to tell.

The story of your life.

The story of everyone’s life.

It’s a story of fears, of the subconscious programmed by a four-year-old, of memories and desires, but it’s a story with a happy ending. At least, the story can have a happy ending, because it’s up to you to write it.

In this book I’ll talk about how you can simply observe the fear of your four-year-old without letting him or her take control, how you can stay centered and present and point yourself in the direction you would like to take. I will help open you to change and to discover yourself as you truly are.